They just missed St. Patrick’s Day, but 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment has done well by “Michael Shayne Mysteries Volume 1,” which I write about in today’s Post in advance of their release on Tuesday. They’ve not only digitally restored this largely forgotten series of B movies about an Irish-American detective, but they’ve placed him in the context of movie history with an excellent documentary about this cinematic forerunner of Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, and a whole raft of other film noir heroes. Among the four fast-paced, surprisingly lavishly produced titles, there is also a featurette on artist Robert McGinnis, who did countless covers for Shayne books and magazines in the 1950s and 1960s. In an especially nice touch, Fox hired McGinnis to do a new cover for the box set, as well as for the slipcases for both DVD double features. (Above, the original theatrical poster for the nifty “Sleepers West,” which was a remake of a Preston Foster vehicle titled “Sleepers East.”)

The wisecracking Shayne — always one step away from having his furniture repossessed — was ably impersonated by the character actor Lloyd Nolan (1902-1985), an especially versatile performer who was born in San Francisco but had a developed decided Bronx accent by the time he began his film career with “G-Men” in 1935. Noir fans know Nolan better as perhaps the nastiest cop of Hollywood’s Golden Age in the Phillip Marlowe thriller “Lady in the Lake.” Nolan’s very long list of credits include playing a dyspeptic doctor on the TV series “Julia.” He ended his career on an especially upbeat note, with a small but poignant role as the long-suffering father of Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey and Dianne Wiest in “Hannah and Her Sisters,” which was released a year after Nolan’s death in 1985.